Missoula adopts Cuban surveillance techniques

There is no Drug War – I don’t know why people cannot see that. In foreign policy, the War merely another name for counterinsurgency, as used in Colombia. That’s known as “murder” for the people of Colombia, as this country uses the Drug War as a cover for operations designed to murder rebels down there. Since all of that started before 9/11, it’s still considered part of the Drug War. Had it started after that date, it would be called part of the “War on Terror,” equally phony. (The Colombia operation is all nicely summed up in a book by Doug Stokes, “America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia”.)

Domestically, the Drug War serves other purposes, such as invasion of privacy and control of minorities. For instance, even though we know that marijuana is not harmful and is widely used, marijuana laws are still vigorously enforced … against certain groups. The popular HBO TV series The Wire highlighted this very well – use of drug laws to target blacks for surveillance and imprisonment, never beginning to stem the flow of drugs, but allowing police to keep a wire on their activities. This is a byproduct of the Civil Rights era, when law enforcement wanted to curtail protests. Imprisonment of black leaders was a good tool. (Suppose that drug enforcers were concerned about cocaine use … would they have wires all over Wall Street? Not likely. That is not a targeted group.)

The Drug War is reaching down into the city of Missoula, Montana, asking people to report on each other in the manner that was once used in the Soviet Union – citizens secretly spying on and reporting on one another. In Cuba they were called “Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDR’s). Neighborhood Watch, people spying on each other … trust no one.

Above is a snip of the form that the City of Missoula wants people to use to report on each other. Maybe paranoid, but law enforcement is coordinated nationwide these days, so this idea did not originate with the Missoula Police Department, and is probably going on all over the country: These programs will likely be intensified in those places where active protest is going on. As with the Drug War in general, it’s a cover for other activities, in this case, to find a legal reason to imprison protesters.

Well, I did my duty last night. I turned in a fellow citizen – as follows:

Of course the Governor is a nice man, not at all involved in drugs of any kind. I used his name because a couple of decades back there was a series of stories run in smaller newspapers in the state involving a drug pipeline that was operating across the Highline. It was some courageous work, and one part I remember was the appearance of a mysterious deposit in Governor Racicot’s Norwest bank account. (It’s known as “sheepdipping.” They were trying to compromise him by making him look guilty.) (Here is the only remnant I can find of this reporting … this particular article claims that Racicot was actually involved … I seriously doubt it.)

So Missoula Police are doing their part in the Drug War, allowing citizens the ability to sheepdip one another, get even with friends, and possibly crack down on the Occupy people. Oh yeah, they might be concerned about drug activity too. Highly unlikely, but we never know.
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h/t 4&20